


All Roads Lead to Torchwood

by McParrot



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Gen, femficfest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-15
Updated: 2019-12-15
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:35:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21803026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/McParrot/pseuds/McParrot
Summary: Cardiff is destroyed as the rift blows wide open. Kathy has some decisions to make.
Kudos: 5





	All Roads Lead to Torchwood

**Author's Note:**

> Fic for Femficfest for Saintmaybe1121  
> Prompt: DI Kathy Swanson has her hands full after the destruction of half of Cardiff.
> 
> McParrot is uploading all her fic to AO3  
> These pieces are not updated or re-edited  
> This piece originally posted on LJ Nov 3 2010

Kathy Swanson trudged through fields of rubble. Even after weeks of destruction she like others still couldn’t get her head around the idea that this was Cardiff. My city, she thought. How could this be my city? It looked like pictures of bomb sites. Bosnia was the battle field of the day when she was growing up, Iraq the place of today. All those ruined cities and now Cardiff. Only Cardiff wasn’t bombed was it? Well other than that one bomb. The bomb that rumours said was planted INSIDE Jack Harkness, but that just couldn’t be true. Jack Harkness was reliably placed facing the multi-headed aliens at Thames House after the bomb went off in the Plass. But, and this did repudiate some claims, he hadn’t been seen since.

And since Jack Harkness left the city, since, she assumed, Torchwood had left the city, Cardiff had fallen apart. The earth’s children might have been saved from an alien threat, but with no one watching this Rift that Davidson and his followers believed Torchwood controlled, Cardiff had shaken itself to pieces. Earthquakes levelled the place, old buildings, new buildings, school buildings, shops, houses, hotels and hospitals. Cardiff was destroyed and only the truly desperate or the very Welsh stayed on to try and put it back together. It was a third world bomb site in a first world country and no one seemed to know what to do about it.

Fracture lines, co incidentally or not, all ended… here. Here, on the spot where Kathy felt compelled to come. Here at the site of the first piece of destruction, the hole in the Plass, the enormous hole in the Plass where the roof had been ripped off the truly enormous underground base of Torchwood. A base that had been here, like a rats nest, growing under the city since this area had been dockland a hundred years ago. Tendrils of the nest were being discovered all the time, running under the Millennium centre, under the bay itself, there were submarine docks down there it was said, missile silos so they said, parking for space ships, acres of areas of archived tat, alien and human. A whole secret history of the world hidden under her city.

How dare they?

How dare Torchwood set this up and just abandon it? How could Torchwood leave the city to literally fall apart? Cardiff was being evacuated, would probably never be rebuilt because the ground was too unstable. That was the official word when all of Cardiff knew that really it wasn’t the ground that was unstable at all, it was their mythical rift, the one that everyone knew about and no one talked about. Cathy had been here long enough to have heard all about it. In a way it was a rite of passage, you’ve lived here long enough to be considered a local when you learn about Torchwood and the rift.

How dare Captain Jack Harkness get himself blown up?

Kathy leant on the orange barriers surrounding the fallen headquarters. She had to make a decision. Stay in Cardiff or go? She’d been offered a place on an anti terrorist task force in London and a place as a senior detective in Manchester. Three months ago she would have jumped at either one of those jobs. Now… she felt she was missing something, missing out. She felt, enough like a local to feel that taking one of those jobs would be selling out. She peered into the dark depths of the far side of the hole, it was all she could see from here. She felt that somewhere down there was the answer to the city’s problems. Somehow, if she knew what she was looking for she could do something about it. Cardiff could be stabilised and Cardiff could then be fixed.

She noticed movement against the barrier on the other side of the hole, a familiar figure. Davidson. Damn it but that man knew much more about Torchwood than he should. As she watched he peered around, as if checking no one was watching. She froze, but he didn’t seem to notice her in the shadows. Then he vaulted the barrier, turned on a torch and clambered down a slope of broken concrete pavers and disappeared into the hole. Kathy knew it was about three stories down to solid ground. The man must have a death wish. She trotted around to the barrier she’d seen him go over and jumped it herself. When she got close to the edge she could see faint signs of a track created in the rubble leading down. It was dark and she had no torch. There was no way she could follow him. What the hell was the man doing?

She could stand here freezing her arse off until he came back up, or she could haul him into her office tomorrow morning and have it out with him. She stayed put, pulling her coat around her and hunching down behind the barrier out of the wind. 

She’d only been there a few minutes when without warning another body launched itself over the barrier, missing standing on her by mere inches. The man, tall and rather beefy was intent on the hole and moved forward, not looking back. He didn’t see her. ‘Andy mate,’ he called. ‘You here yet?’

She heard Davidson’s voice respond from the depths but couldn’t hear what he said. The new man turned on a torch and started down the slab. Now she was closer and with the benefit of the man’s torch she could see climbing ropes had been attached to it. ‘Gwen says she wants us to try in that corner of archive three point six,’ the new man said, the top of his head disappearing into the depths. ‘She thinks that piece we need for the rift manipulator might have been made by this gizmo thing.’ Davidson said something and the new man laughed. ‘Na, it’s all right. I’ve got pictures.’ There was a crashing noise and a few thumps. The man swore. ‘We’ve got to get some proper ladders down here.’ He waited for Davidson’s answer. ‘Yeah, well don’t worry about me,’ he answered sarcastically. ‘Don’t forget I’ve got the thermos with the coffee.’

His voice faded away and she didn’t hear any more. They were obviously set in for a night of fossicking, looking for whatever their gizmo was to fix whatever. Well that was a hopeful sign. It could be hours however before they came back up.

Carefully she climbed back over the barrier to the outside world. Gwen – that would be Gwen Cooper-Williams. And now she thought about it the big bloke looked familiar too, from the warrant posters out when all this mess started. He was her husband, some Welsh name but definitely Mr Williams. It sounded as if Ms Cooper- Williams was working on rebuilding, on fixing what had happened here. It was happening on the quiet, of course it was. While not quite actively being hunted for arrest, the actual warrants on the Torchwood team hadn’t been cancelled. Well Kathy could do something about that.

Walking through the ruined city, weaving around fallen bricks and make-shift barriers Kathy came up with a plan and it didn’t involve moving to either London or Manchester. She’d do what she could do to ease the situation for Torchwood and then she’d resign. She came to a stop in front of a house in a block that had survived the earthquakes. That was lucky. Her knock was answered by a familiar dark haired woman, the light behind her throwing her into silhouette. She was hugely pregnant which explained why she wasn’t down that hole herself.

‘Detective Swanson,’ Gwen Cooper said, with no sign of surprise in her voice. She held out her hand. ‘I think you and I have a future together.’ Kathy took her hand and smiled.


End file.
